The Post-Kantian Poe

Early
in “The Poetic Principle” (1850), Poe warns his readers that, despite his
attempt to articulate the principle of poetry, he has no “design to be
either thorough or profound.” He mocks both those who overestimate the
power of epic poetry (that “epic mania” cherished by German Romanticism)
and those Bostonian didacts who would confuse “Poetic dignity and
force” with the severity of Truth, writing that one “must be theory-mad
beyond redemption who […] shall still persist in attempting to reconcile
the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.” Yet, as the essays
in this collection attest, Poe himself was, in his various engagements
with Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, as “theory-mad ” as those
writers he sought to distance himself from.

This special issue of the Edgar Allan Poe Review is primarily intended to address these multifaceted engagements. A secondary impetus behind this collection has been to reconcile two competing tendencies in Poe scholarship: the antagonism between
materially- and theoretically-oriented approaches to the author and his
work. While the pitfalls of historically disengaged theoretical
criticism are widely acknowledged, the dangers of totally abandoning a
philosophically informed approach are as great, especially in the case
of a writer as metaphysically invested as Edgar Allan Poe.

As
guest editors, we have sought to gather together a collection of essays
that bridge the disciplinary divide between historiography and
philosophy with the underlying belief that informed Poe criticism needs
to address the author and his works in their entirety. Our aim in this
volume is, therefore, not so much to pit “The Purloined Poe” against his
“American Face” as it is to emphasize the transatlantic influences that
indelibly shaped Poe’s writing and to do so in a manner that responds
to the rich body of historicist scholarship that has dominated the field
as of late.
The
organization of the essays in this issue roughly reflects the
chronology of the texts they treat, providing for the reader a
historical cross-section of Poe’s adoptions and perversions of Kantian
and post-Kantian thought throughout his career.

In “The American Dream
Elucidated by Edgar Allan Poe,” Jonathan Murphy addresses the author’s
contentious relations with the nationalist politics of his day. By
offering an overview of the evolution of Poe’s career and by drawing a
historical link between the political thought of Kant, Coleridge, Lacan,
Derrida, and Žižek, Murphy demonstrates that Poe’s metaphysics amount
to a romantic profession of faith in America grounded in a universalist
poetics of desire.

Stephanie Sommerfeld’s contribution, “Post-Kantian
Sublimity and Mediacy in Poe’s Blackwood Tales,”
explores the ways in which Poe’s investment in the discourse of the
sublime, particularly in its Kantian conception, is played out in his
parodic Blackwood tales
of the 1830s. She argues that Poe’s narratives undermine the
Emersonian appropriation of Kant, which remained largely silent on the
negative moments of the Kantian sublime.

In “‘As Urged by Schelling’:
Coleridge, Poe, and the Schellingian Refrain,” Sean Moreland and Devin
Zane Shaw consider Poe’s adaptation of Schelling’s philosophy of art and
his interpretation of mythology, which Poe assimilated primarily by way
of Coleridge. Shaw and Moreland show that Poe, in his critical and
literary practice, adapted Schelling’s and Coleridge’s critiques of
allegory while deflating what he considered to be their metaphysical
pretensions. They conclude with a brief consideration of the role these
critiques play in both Poe’s critical writings and his composition of
“The Raven” (1845).

Sean Kelly, in “Penning Perversion in Poe’s ‘The
Black Cat’,” offers a Kantian analysis of Poe’s theory of perversion as
it is evidenced in his late fiction and especially in “The Black Cat”
(1843). He contends that the narrator of this story is representative
of the onanistic madman that was the subject of much medical controversy
in mid-nineteenth century discourses on the etiological linkage between
masculinity, masturbation, and madness.

Courtney Fugate brings our
special issue to a close with his contribution of “From the German
Cosmological Tradition to Poe’s Eureka.” He argues for the importance of Poe’s Eureka (1848)
not merely as a literary hoax or aesthetic manifesto but as a vital
contribution to the genre of cosmological speculation. Fugate provides a
useful introduction to this fascinating intellectual tradition, in
which Kant and Schelling were also deeply invested.

We
owe Barbara Cantalupo a debt of gratitude for inviting us to guest-edit
this special issue of her journal and for continuing to make The Edgar Allan Poe Review a welcome home for historically-grounded and
theoretically-engaged scholarship. We would also like to thank our
contributors for their hard work and cooperation in meeting our pressing
deadlines. To all of those scholars who submitted abstracts for our
consideration, please know that the plenitude and interest of your
submissions made our editorial decisions difficult. Finally, we are
very grateful to the editorial board of this journal for their
insightful comments and selection suggestions.

The Notes Taken

The Notes Taken is a collaborative blog dedicated to book reviews and occasional rants. We would like to present an informal venue to discuss and debate recent, and sometimes not so recent, literature in philosophy, politics, and fiction.